The Ethical Journalist. Gene Foreman
editor of the Pine Bluff (Arkansas) Commercial (1963–68) and the Arkansas Democrat (1968–71). After retiring from The Inquirer, Foreman was the inaugural Larry and Ellen Foster Professor at Pennsylvania State University (1998–2006). He received two awards for teaching excellence and was the first winner, in 2013, of the Douglas Anderson Contributor Award for contributions to the College of Communications. In 1997 he received a lifetime achievement award from the Philadelphia chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists; in 2017 he received the Benjamin Franklin Award for excellence from the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association; and in 2020 he received the Larry Foster Award for Integrity in Public Communication from the Arthur W. Page Center. He is a 1956 journalism graduate of Arkansas State University.
Daniel R. Biddle wrote investigative stories for The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1986 that won a Pulitzer Prize. With two other reporters, he produced the series “Disorder in the Court,” which revealed transgressions of justice in the Philadelphia court system and led to federal and state investigations. As an editor he oversaw investigative reporters and guided Inquirer coverage of three presidential races. Before joining The Inquirer, he reported for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. He has a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Michigan and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He is a coauthor of a book on civil rights history: Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010). He teaches journalism at the University of Pennsylvania.
Emilie Lounsberry was a staff writer at The Philadelphia Inquirer from 1982 to 2009, and for much of that time she covered trials and wrote about the law, examining a range of issues from a regional and national perspective. Before joining The Inquirer, she worked at The Bulletin in Philadelphia. She has a bachelor’s degree from Temple University and a master’s from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which she attended as a Knight-Bagehot Fellow. She also attended a semester at the University of Pennsylvania as a Richard Burke Fellow. She received the National Association of Black Journalists’ Excellence Award in 2018 and an American Judicature Society’s Toni House Journalism Award in 2013 for “outstanding reporting that enhances public understanding of the courts.” Since 2009, she has been an associate professor in the Department of Journalism and Professional Writing at The College of New Jersey. Earlier, she taught a semester at Princeton University as the Ferris Professor of Journalism.
Richard G. Jones is managing editor for Opinion at The Philadelphia Inquirer and was, most recently, the Walter H. Annenberg-Edmund P. Joyce Director of the John W. Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics, and Democracy at the University of Notre Dame. Earlier, in eight years at The Inquirer, he wrote a daily column and was a national correspondent based in Atlanta. Moving to The New York Times, he was a reporter and later associate editor. He led The Times’s newsroom summer internship program and a two-week professional development program for collegiate members of the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. He was twice a winner of the Times Publisher’s Award. He is a graduate of the University of Delaware, where he was editor of the student newspaper. He holds a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, which he attended as a Knight-Bagehot Fellow. He has advanced to Ph.D. candidacy in journalism studies at the University of Maryland, where he is a Scripps-Howard Doctoral Fellow.
Acknowledgments
We the coauthors are grateful to friends and fellow journalists who contributed their expertise to help us create, in this Third Edition of The Ethical Journalist, a comprehensive examination of journalism ethics in the digital age.
We offer our thanks to the Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication, whose generous grant supported the research, writing, and production of the Third Edition. Established in 2004 at what is now the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Pennsylvania State University, the Page Center is dedicated to the study and advancement of ethics in all forms of public communication. Denise Bortree, the Page Center’s director, took a personal interest in our project and offered encouragement as work progressed.
We thank Charles Knittle, retired copy chief at The New York Times, for his tireless work as editor, fact-checker, proofreader, and counselor in guiding the manuscript into print. We are also grateful to Katie O’Toole, who teaches in the Bellisario College at Penn State, and Mary Lowe Kennedy, who is retired after decades of editing. Katie and Mary Lowe read the entire manuscript and did what gifted editors do: They raised questions that made us think, and they recommended revisions that improved the book.
The exciting new page design of this edition is the work of Bill Marsh, who also produced the book’s graphics. Bill did this superb work during crises in world health and US politics, which made his day job at The New York Times particularly demanding. One Times graphic of this period that he helped design, depicting the US death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic, occupied nearly 40 percent of a print edition’s front page.
We are indebted to Dean Marie Hardin of the Bellisario College at Penn State. Along with other support they gave our project, Dean Hardin and Assistant Dean Robert Martin put us in touch with Varshini Chellapilla, who worked as our researcher in the weeks after receiving her degree in journalism from Penn State in May 2020.
We are grateful to Elizabeth H. Hughes, Gabriel Escobar, Danese Kenon and Evan Benn of The Philadelphia Inquirer for the use of its photo archive.
We thank Philip B. Corbett, associate managing editor for standards of The New York Times, for writing the book’s insightful Foreword.
We thank the journalists who generously allowed their work to be used in the book as Point of View essays or as illustrations. Their contributions are acknowledged where they appear in the book.
We thank our colleagues at Wiley-Blackwell who worked to shepherd our book into print. Todd Green is the editor whose idea it was to publish a Third Edition. Others at Wiley-Blackwell who joined the project include Andrew Minton, Nicole Allen, Jon Boylan, Sophie Bradwell, Christy Michael, and Robert Saigh.
Below, the coauthors extend individual thanks to people who sat for interviews or who gave support in other ways:
Gene Foreman – Bob Steele, the longtime ethicist at the Poynter Institute, retired but still a leading authority on the rights and wrongs of journalism. Colleagues at Penn State: Katie O’Toole, Russ Eshleman, John Affleck, Tony Barbieri, John Beale, John Dillon, Patrick Plaisance, Shaheen Pasha, Bu Zhong, and Curt Chandler. Other interviewees: Jane Eisner of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism; Thomas Kent, professor and consultant; Steve Bien-Aime of Northern Kentucky University; and Megan O’Matz of the South Florida Sun Sentinel. And special thanks to Gene’s children and grandchildren for their continued support of his research and writing.
Daniel R. Biddle – Clea Benson of Politico; Rick Berke of the STAT health and medicine news site; John Daniszewski of The Associated Press; Mary Jordan, Eugene Robinson, Paul Farhi, and Kevin Sullivan of The Washington Post; Al Letson of Reveal; Ann Marie Lipinski of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University; Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute and NPR; Monica Rhor of the Houston Chronicle; Peter Nicholas of The Atlantic; George Rodrigue of Advance Local Media; Hasit Shah of Quartz; Sandra Clark of WHYY in Philadelphia; David Shribman, formerly of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Cindy Skrzycki of the University of Pittsburgh; Joseph Tedesco of SUNY Maritime College and his daughter, Julia Tedesco of the Fordham International Law Journal; Julia Terruso and Barry Zukerman of The Philadelphia Inquirer; the biographer Larry Tye; Dean Baquet of The New York Times; the psychologist Augie Hermann; Professor J. Nathan Matias of Cornell University; Deb Howlett and Deborah Gump, former directors of the University of Delaware’s journalism program; co-director Elaine Simon and program coordinator Victoria Karkov of the University of Pennsylvania’s urban studies program; and the Philadelphia lawyers Amy Ginensky and Vincent V. Carissimi. Thanks as well to former Inquirer colleagues Murray Dubin and Stephen Seplow,